Triumph of the Cyborg Composer

An anonymous reader writes "UC Santa Cruz emeritus professor David Cope's software, nicknamed Emmy, creates beautiful original music. So why are people so angry about that? From the article: 'Cope attracted praise from musicians and computer scientists, but his creation raised troubling questions: If a machine could write a Mozart sonata every bit as good as the originals, then what was so special about Mozart? And was there really any soul behind the great works, or were Beethoven and his ilk just clever mathematical manipulators of notes?'"

Comments

It's maths all the way down

[Anonymous Coward]

Deal with it.

Re:It's maths all the way down

[h4rm0ny]

Left brain - Right brain is some outmoded New Age nonsense. Let it die.

What gets me is the way the summary immediately shows two similarly uninformed prejudices. Firstly, that if a machine could write a symphony like Mozart, then those symphonies are less special. No, just no. Clearly the summary writer doesn't actually listen to or value this sort of music (I do) because if they did, then they would realise that the music has a worth all of its own because it is beautiful, not just an attitude of 'I should respect this because a person with skill did it." The second assumption, even more grotesque, is that if a machine can do it, maybe there is no "soul" to music at all. There's so much wrong with this second part that I could barely begin. They suppose that soul is an exclusive property of humans, that a machine can never share that property. They presume such a property exists as a noun, rather than a way of describing an interaction and they presume that "soul" must be provided from the musician to the listener, not that a listener can bring a spiritual quality to what they appreciate themselves. When a beautiful landscape makes one feel spiritual, is that because someone infused it with "soul"? Or is it simply the onlooker's appreciation of beauty? Why is that mysteriously subtracted from music depending on its source?

Good for the creators of this. It reminds me of the music in the spaceship in Douglas Adam's "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency". I'll tell you this - if mankind is going to be crushed / superceded / patronised by a future AI, I'd rather it was one that understood music, than one that did not. Lets leave the repeating meme of: "machines are superior in lots of ways but we're still better because we have this essential human capacity to love / enjoy music / create art / self-sacrifice / humany-humanness" to Star Trek and other technophobic media and people. If music is beautiful and good for us, then by all means let machines offer us their compositions. Aren't some people always complaining about how machines dehumanize and have no "soul"? Fine, let's not complain when it appears we can make ones that don't.

For some reason, I have an image in my mind of Summer Glau as a Terminator, quietly performing her ballet. Of course, that may have nothing to do with reading this story. ;)

Too much time on their hands

[oldhack]

Good tunes are good tunes. What's their problem?

Re:Too much time on their hands

[CliffH]

Exactly. Honestly don't care who or what writes the music, as long as it is good, thought provoking, emotional, or just plain neat. I listen for the enjoyment of the music, not for the composer of the music.

Re:Too much time on their hands

[GlassHeart]

The fact that a relatively simple machine (especially when we look back ten or fifty years from now) can do what was originally thought to be difficult undermines the pedestal that many humans have put themselves on. This is why people were upset when Deep Blue beat Kasparov. It would have to be a skill that we've abandoned as uniquely human - such as raw mathematical calculations - that a machine would be allowed to beat us at without this sort of reaction.

Fact is, what's hard for humans to do isn't necessarily hard for a computer, but those who fail to understand that get upset.

Re:Too much time on their hands

[Darkness404]

While the concept of having a full album has been lost, a lot of music is best listened to in album form. For example, while its possible to enjoy Pink Floyd's singles on The Wall album, in order to truly get the message its best to listen to the entire album. A lot of records were made this way before the advent of the CD and now digital singles. Yes, today an album is simply a collection of singles, but once upon a time (and some bands still release them like before) an album was a work as a whole, never meant to be separated.

Re:Too much time on their hands

[greg1104]

Deep Blue beat Kasparov after being trained on a giant library of Kasparov games. If Emmy can be trained to compose like Mozart after being exposed to his music I'm similarly unimpressed. The fact that it's possible to extract patterns from analyzing human behavior and then replicate those patterns as well as a person isn't all that special. Deep Blue had its occasional moment where it did something really brilliant that no person was likely to have ever considered, but even that's only after having consumed centuries of human knowledge to reach that point.

Re:Too much time on their hands

[HungryHobo]

but even that's only after having consumed centuries of human knowledge to reach that point.

Sure Einstein has his moments where he did something really brilliant that no person was likely to have ever considered, but even that's only after having consumed centuries of human knowledge to reach that point.

Re:Too much time on their hands

[raddan]

Yes, but humans consume vast quantities of past human behavior as well. We do it very differently (or so we think), but exactly how that works is still a mystery, and we call it 'culture'.

My opinion is that-- if we can create a machine that can make original music as beautiful, aesthetically and intellectually, as our best work, this is not a triumph of machines over humans. We built them! It is a triumph of understanding of ourselves. In every way that matters, that machine is as much as a work of art as the music is. Maybe I think this now because I've been thinking lately about automata and the languages that they express...

My point is this: is the oak tree outside your window any less beautiful because you understand why it's leaves are green? That a steak is any less tastier because of Maillard reactions? That your children are any less awesome because we know they came from a sperm and an ovum? I think it is more beautiful when we know how it works. We can better appreciate what we have.

Re:Too much time on their hands

[dakameleon]

If I have seen farther than others it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.

-- Sir Isaac Newton

Re:Too much time on their hands

[AK Marc]

people like mozart were brilliant composers not because they were wonderfully creative but because they were awesome mathematicians.

But that's just silly. That's like claiming dogs understand physics because they can estimate where a ball is landing. They don't understand physics. They understand that a ball going in that direction and speed lands about there, and they learn that through repetition, not understanding of the underlying math.

Similarly, just because compositions can be mathematically generated doesn't mean that any human uses that method to do it. Likely, it was more like a dog. Once you've heard enough of the combinations, you just know whether it will be good or bad. You don't calculate it, just like the dog doesn't, but you feel it (estimate it) based on experience.

Re:Too much time on their hands

[ceoyoyo]

Yes, because people do their best work fresh out of the womb without exposure to anything else in their field of endeavour. Mozart, for example, didn't study music at all, and his father wasn't a music director and teacher.

Here's To Mozart!

[CorporateSuit]

If a machine could write a Mozart sonata every bit as good as the originals, then what was so special about Mozart?

Mozart's greatest contribution to music wasn't neccessarily his symphonies. It was the algorithms he constructed, finding that pleasing music has mathematical undertones. I'm sure he would be emphatically proud of the machine, and would have, no doubt, used it in order to broaden his ability to compose. Imagine, using these machines to compose sibling symphonies, when played alone, sound pleasing, but when played together combine to form an entirely new harmony. Something that would take a human hundreds of years of trial and error, or some brutal headscratching to correctly compose... instead tweaked, played back, and suggested by an appliance.

These robots do no more harm to him and his legacy than Adobe Photoshop does to Pablo Picasso.

Math

[girlintraining]

I suppose next we'll be saying Einstein was just some idiot who used his understanding of mathematics to point out the "obvious" theory of relativity, spacetime, and all of that. What the hell is up with this anti-science bent society has come up with lately? It's almost as if the application of mathematics to everyday life is now to be viewed with skepticism, rather than praised for allowing us a deeper understanding of our world.

So what if music can be described mathematically? So musicians are also gifted with an intuitive understanding of mathematics that we can't fully understand yet. Wouldn't it be prudent to explore this connection? Why could Mozart and other artists grasp these fundamentals over four hundred years before our contemporaries found a natural connection between their talent and a mathematical understanding? What does this mean for the human mind? For us? Does this shed some light on an aspect of the human condition that was previously unilluminated?

You know what? I don't care whether music is created by a person or a machine -- if it enriches my life, that is what matters.

As much genre as you want

[Okian Warrior]

I've actually listened to some of Professor Cope's synthetic music.

Each piece replicates pretty well the style and feel of a particular author or genre of music. Probably not all possible genres and authors, but certainly the ones I've listened to.

What happens when we have the ability to generate as much music of a particular style as we want? Mozart had a particular style - how many hours of listening to Mozart-ish music do you need before it becomes commonplace and boring?

One of the nice things about $FamousComposer is that his works *are* famous... and finite. I don't think I want to burn out my appreciation for someone by listening to his style for hours on end.

So I'm wondering if this will become a problem for kids of the future. Loading up their ipods with hours and hours of a particular style, then getting bored with it. I like having an appreciation for particular authors.

Re:As much genre as you want

[lawpoop]

Each piece replicates pretty well the style and feel of a particular author or genre of music.

To me, this is why grand proclamations of 'Computers Compose Music!' have had a fraudulent tone to them. The first step in supposedly getting a computer to 'compose' music is to feed it a bunch of music in a style originated by a great composer. Well, the human being did the 'black box' work of inventing the genre in the first place; all these programs seem to do is play some kind of souped-up mad-libs with that body of work.

"But Mozart studied other people's work before he wrote his works!" Yeah, that's true, but he *didn't* study *Mozart's* work before he wrote it. These works of genius are sui generis, original, unlike what came before it. Mozart studied other people's stuff, and came up with his own unique, original stuff. This program studies Mozart, and comes up with Mozart-stuff.

What seems to be missing is some creative element, that isn't merely copying or re-hashing what came before it, but somehow is truly 'creative' in the sense that it makes something brand new, unlike its predecessors.

Re:So what...

[plover]

The great composers might not have done it through conscious math. They may simply have been "wired" that way, to hear music, to break it down into its components, and then reassemble them with their own style. We don't know, because they're gone.

Cope, on the other hand, waded through their work, identifying phrase after phrase, cataloging and quantifying what they had done, and spotted the very patterns by which they broke the rules. More importantly he figured out how to describe and codify those patterns. The analysis process took him years. Writing the software was possibly the easiest part of the whole task.

And once he was done, he was able to quantify other musicians work, and discovered that styles were plagiarized all over the place. Perhaps not consciously, but he found that composers everywhere and everywhen were building upon the music of their predecessors.

That's a metric ton of hard, grinding work, and is definitely evidence of higher brain power than J. Random Slashdotter. (And likely a severe case of OCD.)

Re:Does it really matter?

[FiloEleven]

If you can work the software, you can sound every bit as good as the best musicians of the past without a day of musical training.

Not exactly. Auto-tune is basically a float-to-integer converter for your voice, plus the ability to lock into a given scale or in extreme cases to an arbitrary pitch fed to it through MIDI, more like a vocoder. If you should be singing a C and you sing a half-assed flat A instead, it's going to change it to a pristine A (with that nasty hard edge that lets close listeners know you're using a tuner). For someone who isn't completely tone-deaf, this will allow them to perform as well as a good singer, but "the best musicians of the past" also composed at a more elite level than your average person. The craft has to be of quality to make it worth listening to; a perfectly pitched cover of a Blink 182 song is still going to sound like crap (come to think of it, I'm pretty sure they auto-tune).

Apparently, the computer can even compose your score, now, too.

Again, not exactly. From the article:

This program [called Emily Howell] would write music in an odd sort of way. Instead of spitting out a full score, it converses with Cope through the keyboard and mouse. He asks it a musical question, feeding in some compositions or a musical phrase. The program responds with its own musical statement. He says “yes” or “no,” and he’ll send it more information and then look at the output. The program builds what’s called an association network — certain musical statements and relationships between notes are weighted as “good,” others as “bad.” Eventually, the exchange produces a score, either in sections or as one long piece.

Cope, the software's author, clearly plays a role in the creation. The machine spits out ideas and he keeps the ones he likes. Later in the article he says his new focus is in using "on-the-fly programs" to come up with quick and dirty sketches of musical ideas to use in his own compositions. The first program, Emmy, relied on volumes of material from a composer to write new works in their style. Cope fed Emmy his work and the ensuing piece was one of the most highly rated in his career. And yet, it took Emmy dozens of inputs to produce that piece, and each of those pieces was hand-crafted by a human being. All this means is that computers will continue to be wonderful tools; they have already greatly lowered the bar for entry into the act of music creation, yet they have not raised the quality. If anything the opposite is true.

Progress happens.

"Progress" is a tricky term to use with music or any of the arts. New people (or machines!) try new things and spur others to do the same, but probably everyone here can think of a recent (20th century) song performed by a single singer and an acoustic guitar that is very moving. The guitar is over 800 years old, the scale it uses has only 12 tones, and the song you're thinking of likely has five chords in it at the most, yet their convergence in this particular manner results in something that resonates with you. In the realm of art, it is the particular that matters, and progress concerns itself with generalities. That is to say, there is no more chance of finding out what makes music "tick" as there is in why your favorite film is your favorite: there are thousands of reasons even for people who love the same film, and there are thousands of films to choose from.